Murphey's Law

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Indeed, yesterday, it did. It was my first running the store. I was the only member of management there, putting me in charge of the other two people I was working with, along with all the money and paperwork and blah blah blah. So how did it go?

I came in to find a note from the person who had closed the night before. It was his last day on the job. His leaving is the reason I got promoted. Now, maybe it's just me, but I find it just slightly suspicious that on his last night, whoops! there's money missing from the drawers. According to him, all the drawers were way off. He tried fixing it by moving money from drawer to drawer, altering the bank deposit paperwork, etc. He also failed to count the safe, which he was supposed to have done first. That means he made the deposit before making sure the safe had the correct amount of money in it, which it did not. Oh well, it was his last night, not his problem right? Yeah, just my problem this morning...

I finally got the store open, though several more draw audits were necessary throughout the day to sort that mess out. But I opened with one employee instead of two. One of my high schoolers "didn't know" they had to work that day. I promptly let him know he needed to get his scrawny butt in there...

A customer came in that afternoon to return a $200 dresser. He tells me its around back. I'm thinking, why the hell is it back there?? But I finish what I'm doing and go look for it. I can't find it. I go ask him again where he put it, because I'm thinking maybe he just wasn't sure where our back door was. I mean, there are a lot of backdoors that all look pretty much the same. He tells me he knows where our back door is. So I look again, and walk around a bit, and still come up with no dresser. I ask him to walk around behind the store with me and help me find it. But it's not there. In the five minutes between his dropping it off and me going to get it, someone had carted it off. They wouldn't even have known at first glance what it was, since it was still in its shipping box. And it would only fit something large, like a truck. I spent the next hour trying to find people like the district manager, who was of course on vacation (stupid holiday), and talking with mall security...

When I closed the store, all the registers have to say "closed". Two of mine said "signed off." I didn't know how to fix it. I did know that without those registers closing, the back office server would show me what my real totals for the day were, meaning I couldn't send my require e-mail to the district manager reporting what we'd done for the day. On top of that, because the closing checklist hasn't become habit yet, it took me almost an hour. It usually takes about 20 minutes or so. My associates were getting bored, and took to throwing pieces of wheat from the floral pieces at me while I recounted money....

I must have called the store manager 6 times yesterday. She assures me that it can't get any worse, as this was the worse first day she'd ever heard of. There was no 9 am phone call from today's opening manager asking what the hell went wrong. Let's just hope that means I didn't screw anything up too bad. This could be the shortest promotion ever.